A notice for people using mail.ru addresses

[orudge]

E-mail addresses ending in mail.ru have been banned from the forum, primarily because all these spammers recently have been signing up with mail.ru addresses. If this has affected any genuine users, please get in touch with me (e-mail forums@tt-forums.net) and I'll see what can be done.

Apologies for the inconvenience to any users this may cause problems for.

[Oleg]

The matter is not with @mail.ru, but with the easyness of forging an e-mail address. Mail.ru is one of Russia's biggest free email providers, so I wouldn't be glad to see it banned. Some spammer may use @hotmail.com or even @owenrudge.net (why not?) - would you also block it?

BTW, does it also mean I won't receive private message notifications etc. to my @mail.ru address?

Perhaps it would be better to change the CAPTCHA algorithm used for submitting registration information. I'm now studying this matter, if there are any practical results, I can let you know.

[Patchman]

It only affects new registrations, existing accounts will continue to work. Also, we can always allow specific registrations with mail.ru addresses, it just won't be automatic.

The problem isn't forged addresses either, because when signing up, the forum software sends a cookie to the email address which is required to complete the registration. So apparently spammers create lots of real mail.ru accounts and automate the creation of phpBB accounts with them. I guess signing up for a mail.ru account is just too easy.

TT-Forums does use a captcha, but the phpBB captcha is easily worked around, so it doesn't offer much if any protection.

We've had a lot of porn and prescription/drugs spam in the past few weeks, and almost all of it was from accounts created using a mail.ru address. We (the moderators and admins) just don't want to waste so much time cleaning up after the spam.

[nicfer]

Yes, I noted also those spammers in another forum, now I will try to recommend your solution to the admin of that forum . Thanks for your solution (if I am allowed of sharing this solution).

EDIT: Those spammers are bots as the other forum admins says.

[Oleg]

I think I'd better try to contact mail.ru administration. The decision to ban mail.ru globally will give a painful blow to a too large number of Russian users.